“We will not die quietly”

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Police say a 13-week Just Stop Oil campaign cost them more than 7.7 million (Photo by DANIEL LEAL/AFP via Getty Images)

Police say a 13-week Just Stop Oil campaign cost them more than £7.7million, as a senior Met officer decried their actions as more of a crime than a protest.

But the fossil fuel action group for climate hit back – saying his comments made it clear that legitimate protests were now being treated as a crime.

The Metropolitan Police have monitored or responded to 515 protests led by Just Stop Oil (JSO) since April, LBC reports, including 13 weeks of persistent slow marches on many of London’s main roads, as well as the disruption of high profile sporting and cultural events.

More than 270 people have been arrested so far, and JSO shows no signs of slowing down just yet, with recent high-profile actions involving suspected activists scattering confetti on the Wimbledon grounds, invading the Proms stage at the Royal Albert Hall and interrupting a Channel 4s The Last Leg live broadcast.

Other protest actions have targeted everything from the Chelsea Flower Show to the London Pride Parade, to the spray painting of the Department of Energy Security building and Net Zero. But climate activists have also faced increasing hostility, and sometimes even violence or attacks.

Speaking on LBC on Monday, Deputy Commissioner Matt Twist said: The Met is a resilient organization, was a big organization and was used to controlling protests, but that’s a pretty chronic thing.

In terms of each day, we have over 150 officers who would normally be policing local communities, policing in and around other parts of London.

And one of the challenges that we have with Just Stop Oil is that they don’t tell us where they’re going to protest, they don’t tell us when they’re going to take that action, they don’t engage, which means we have to put more officers on it than we otherwise would.

Twist said JSO’s actions were “truly unique” in terms of protest, but was not shy about criticizing them. “In any democratic society, the right to protest is rightly heavily protected… But it’s not protest, it’s a crime, and there is a difference.”

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He continued: “When you deliberately set out to cause serious disruption to the public in London, by preventing people from going about their daily lives, by preventing people from going to work or to hospital, or taking their children to school, then that escalates into crime.”

The Met said the latest £7.7million was on top of the £7.5million spent by the police force on JSO protest actions between October and December last year.

However, a spokesperson for Just Stop Oil told NationalWorld: ‘There you have it, the result of the black-and-white police law – legitimate protest is now considered a crime.’

They continued, “This oil-funded regime locks us in annihilation and will lock in all who dissent. But we will not die quietly. We will continue to resist until the government agrees to shut down new oil and gas.”

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